"The city of Roule had at first only a small chapel affiliated to a leper-house, which had been established for the workers of the Mint, particularly exposed to skin diseases. The chapel, dedicated to Saint Jacques and Saint Philippe became a parish in 1699. In the 18th c. the inhabitants of Roule requested that their village became a suburb of the capital; a request which was granted to them in 1722. But the church threatened to collapse, and had to be demolished in 1739. The place of worship was thus moved to a neighbouring barn.
In 1764 the churchwardens and the parishioners got united to make their complaints heard, for the situation could not last any longer: 'We are obliged, they say, to conduct the divine office in a barn, which is more like a stable, in which cows were kept, where we have to climb down several degrees, and where there is a foot of water during some floods: it is so humid that everything rots there.'
In 1768 the Academy of architecture approved the plans drawn up by Chalgrin, for the construction of a new church. In 1774 the count of Provence laid the first stone of the building, which was completed in 1784."